The topic of bitcoin units seems to come up often around here - and particularly the perceived psychological impediment to dealing with fractions of a coin.

It occurs to me that in user interfaces, it might be handy to have some visual cues (eg in the form of coloured coin images) as to the sum involved in any particular transaction.For example - any amount above 1BTC would be Gold (as per the common bitcoin coin logos)An amount from 1 bitcent to less than 1BTC - SilverFrom 1 milli-bitcoin to less than 1 bitcent - Bluefrom 1 micro-bitcoin to less than 1 milli-bitcoin Green 0 to less than 1 micro-bitcoin (ie satoshis) Red

The pink and brown ones were just thrown in to make it clear how nano/pico fit in - perhaps for future use.I liked the idea of 'pinkies' being a sub-satoshi unit (like the pinky finger) and well.. brown for pico because it reminds me of those muddy coloured 1 and 2c pieces we used to have here in australia.

The colour scheme is primarily based on SI units milli,micro,nano.. except that bitcents and satoshis are interesting enough to warrant extra colour divides.As a slight hint that silver(bitcents) and red(satoshis) are a little different - I've put the c & s on the right side of the corresponding coin image too.

Below is an outline of the scheme I had in mind. I'm hoping something like this might be picked up as a standard across shopping carts, wallet software etc.. My apologies if something like this is already out there - I couldn't find it.Feedback on whether my choice of colours is good/awful welcome.Any GUI builders interested in incorporating this and helping evangelize it as a standard?

EDIT: to make this clearer, I'm not suggesting that a particular displayed amount would be shown multicoloured as it is in the image below.That's just to show where the divisions lie and help people understand the units.

EDIT: changed satoshis from red to black - because satoshi is surely some sort of ninja. oh.. and because it might help red-green colourblind people, and because some people are averse to rainbows.

As far as the psychological impediment to dealing in fractions of a bitcoin - I'm hoping that if there was a widely understood naming and colour scheme - that things such as the blue millicoin or green uBTC would feel like tradable units in their own right more than just some number with a bunch of leading zeroes.It should theoretically help reduce errors, especially for newcomers to bitcoin.

Great Idea, I think some play needs to be done with the colors. Resistor color coding come to mind,

mm.. as I used to be into electronics - I don't know why this didn't occur to me!

I felt a little constrained in that whole BTC should be gold(yellow) and it really seems most logical for bitcents to be silver(as far as I'm aware - this would be familiar to people from many nations as the colour of most higher value coins?)Having those 2 colours fixed.. kind of rules out following the scheme used by resistors I guess.

I chose green as the microcoin just because green is widely associated with money - and I guess I was in an absurdly optimistic mood in thinking that when whole BTC become impractical as a general unit of trade - we'll all be doing our day to day transactions down in the green zone

but I don't want to look at a rainbow, and might make BTC look gay and deter some users.

Well.. I don't really anticipate that rainbows would be displayed that much.

Quote from: julz

e.g for 0.00159265 - that'd just be displayed in blue, perhaps with the blue mBTC logo alongside.

EDIT: As pointed out by others 0.00159265 would be Gold - as it's still in BTC units.It may make sense for a confirmation dialog/notification panel to display it as 1.59265 mBTC Blue to give an indication of the scale.

The full 3.14159265 would normally be displayed as gold - it's just for explanatory purposes that the colour chart shows it rainbow-fashion.

It doesn't seem so useful to me to do anything colour related with large numbers of whole BTC. I think everyone is familiar enough with commas/spaces as thousands separators etc and it wouldn't really assist. It's all gold up there!

I did think of colour blind people.. and even looked it up to see if it should affect my colour choice,but in the end I found there were a few different types of colour blindness, and I didn't really see what I could do about it.Just read the sub-bitcoin logos I guess!

But I don't see the average person adopting this color/name scheme for fractional bitcoins. A much simpler approach is needed. I don't know what the solution is. Obviously I could be wrong, but who, besides bitcoin enthusiasts, wants to remember seven different colors and names for amounts of bitcoins?

This is going to turn many people off bitcoins. It turns me off. This is way, way too geeky.

You know what it reminds me of? A resistor color code chart. Something only a geek or engineer would ever memorize. The average person is not an engineer. They don't want to think about bitcoins all the time. Bitcoins must be so easy to use, there is never a need to think about the process. Just click send! That's what the average person wants.

If bitcoin becomes so massively deflated that 0.001 buys a coffee, then we might commonly refer to them as millicoins or some such name. Though there is little precedent -- I've only rarely seen references to things like megadollars. Many bank notes distinguish denominations by color (shapes, pictures of royalty/presidents, bridges, and architecture), but upon what bitcoin medium are these graphics to be standardized?

I think this is analogous to proposing that feminine names are pink and masculine are blue.

the Satoshi (100000000 Satoshi's to the BTC) is the smallest unit available, so not sure what you would do with the piccoins if you had any... You wouldn't be able to create any transactions with them, or render them in the bitcoin client...

the Satoshi (100000000 Satoshi's to the BTC) is the smallest unit available, so not sure what you would do with the piccoins if you had any... You wouldn't be able to create any transactions with them, or render them in the bitcoin client...

Will

You could pay someone a single "satoshi" and then have them break them up outside of a transaction.

It is great work! Something has to come up like this in the future. The symbols are important. Some males are color blind but that is not a big issue. Buying something in the future priced at 0.00345 is odd. People are comfortable with around 3 or 4 decimal places so 3.34 mills is a good label on a product. Your Idea is on the right track.